The late Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who had shot to fame with his first book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, used to call himself 'the youngest writer' of India when his memoirs had come out. At that point of time, he was in his 60s. Why did he appropriate the 'the youngest writer' title for himself? He had just published his first book! That was his logic.

I just read about William Maxwell, an American writer, who got noticed only after he came out with his sixth book. He was in his 70s then. If you have lost hope, read this story.

Here is the dope on him from IHT:In 1980 a slim novel appeared that introduced a "new" writer to the American public. It had a deceptively casual title, "So Long, See You Tomorrow," yet it quickly became a book many readers fervently loved and pressed on their friends. The author, William Maxwell, was in his early 70s and this was his sixth novel, not his first. From 1936 to 1976 he had been a fiction editor at The New Yorker, working with (and often befriending) writers like John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, J.D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov and Eudora Welty. And in 1980, Welty presented him with the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the best novel of the last five years. Maxwell's new readers could scarcely know that he had been rehearsing elements of the same painful story since 1937, when he brought out his second novel, "They Came Like Swallows." Introducing his collected stories, "All the Days and Nights," in 1994, Maxwell recalled boarding a freighter for Martinique back in 1933, searching for new experiences to write about: "I had no idea that three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The cast of larger-than-life-size characters - affectionate aunts, friends of the family, neighbors white and black - that I was presented with when I came into the world."

I like stories about writers. They fascinate me and make me wonder about the writerly life. I think I have mentioned this so many times in my previous posts. Boring, eh?

In today's publishing world, writers have to help hype up their work in the market to sell. Very few writers have the guts to shun publicity. In fact, for many the prospect of becoming a minor celebrity is one of the magnetic pulls of desiring to become a writer.

J D Salinger and Thomas Pynchon are already famous for their reclusiveness.

Cormac McCarthy was recently coaxed into granting his first interview in 13 years to promote his new novel No Country for Old Men.

Even before his cult status translated into major book sales with All the Pretty Horses in 1992, McCarthy spurned the spotlight and would not even speak about his work in academic circles where he had already won critical acclaim.

In an anecdote reported by The New York Times Magazine when it printed the last interview with McCarthy in 1992, his second wife Annie DeLisle recalls living in poverty.

"Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week," she was quoted as saying.

No Country for Old Men is a violent modern-day Western about a man who finds a suitcase filled with $2 million of drug money in the desert in a car whose occupants have been shot.

Twelve Hawks is a pseudonym and all that is known about the author of The Traveler - published this month amid Hollywood-style hype that landed it on The New York Times bestseller list - is that he "lives off the grid," meaning he has no mobile phone, credit card or other means of being traced.

His editor speaks to Twelve Hawks by satellite phone, has never met him and has no idea where he lives. Billed as a cross between science-fiction movie Matrix and George Orwell's 1984, the book is set in a world of constant surveillance where rebel warriors called Harlequins defend prophet-like people called Travelers.

Alas in India, we don't have reclusive authors. Indeed, it is the other way round. Writers, even if they want publicity, don't have it coming as Indian newspapers and television care a damn about them. They are more interested in film stars, mafia dons, and politicians.

First-time novelist, Rana Dasgupta, discussed this issue in an article in Tehelka recently. I quote (he is describing the scene after his novel was published):

"Over time, a small number of reviews appeared. Attentive and well-written, they were at the same time introspective and unambitious. For the most part, they remained at the level of the literary, speaking of the various pleasures and displeasures of the reading experience, and devoting their discussion to issues of literary language and form. They seemed to approach literature as private pleasure rather than as a part of the more general, extra-literary conversations of the world. This was somewhat disappointing since I had conceived this book as a pointed intervention into such conversations.If you examine the cramped, ghetto-like environs that newspaper editors provide for book reviews, however, all this is not surprising. It is difficult, in a review of less than 800 words, to do much more than simply describe a book, and book reviews in Indian newspapers are often much shorter than that. The most extensive space allotted to book reviews in a mainstream newspaper is the Asian Age’s Sunday book section which is a cut-and-paste job from the New York Times and Spectator — with the emphasis on “cut”. In order to fit these articles into their new, straitened quarters, the “editors” run the paragraphs together, cut out the connecting words and phrases (“of course,” “unfortunately”, “however”) and then pluck out whole sentences and paragraphs for good measure. It is predictable that such an ethos would create a besieged mentality amongst those Indian journalists who genuinely love and wish to celebrate literature. It is not surprising if they choose to speak about books as pure aesthetic experience, as a kind of guilty, sensuous refuge from a journalism that is so brutally pragmatic and market-driven. If they do not often try to speak about a book in the world, it is because this is not the editorial conception of their task: they are not asked to describe a vision, or a set of ideas that connects to other sets of ideas, but simply to describe the experience that can be obtained for Rs 395.

And even when reviewers approach their task with greater ambitions than this, the other pages of the newspaper act with single-minded intent to cut books and their ideas back down to size.In addition to the sparse smattering of reviews of my book came a veritable deluge of phone calls from journalists wishing to write what they called “profiles”. The interest of this second category of journalists was not in “literature” but in “personality”. They wrote for columns with stomach-churning titles like “Celebtalk” and they came to my house to note down a few snatched words that could then be patched together in a collage of more or less incoherent stereotypical catch-phrases crowned with a photograph. One sensed among them a panic of speed, the terrible anxiety of having to feed the newspaper’s insatiable hunger for new and different kinds of celebrity; and they were often hilariously unprepared. I had one exchange with a journalist who possessed only two items of information about me — the fact that I had written a book, and my mobile telephone number — and who had to extract from me, during the course of a twenty-minute phone conversation, various other items essential to her article (whose deadline was approaching in the next two hours) — such as the title of the book, the nature of its contents, and my name. The pieces that finally appeared in the newspapers were so mangled and improvised that they frequently bordered on the bizarre. What kind of individual will symbolise this nation in its era of markets and world takeover, its era of buying French pharmaceutical firms and judging Cannes and building global it centres and sleeping with Liz Hurley? Certainly not the dreamy, thinking type. Not the kind of person who sits alone in a room for years on end wrestling with an entirely cerebral, poetic project. My conversations with the writers of “profiles” therefore had little to do with the book I had written, which was the ostensible reason they had any interest in me in the first place. They asked questions, instead, about what means I had employed to secure a publishing contract, and what it was like, now, to revel in publicity. The fact that I had spent three years forging a 400-page communication with the world was not relevant; now I had to tell the real story, which was the one of my own ambition, calculation and endeavour. The book was just my “product”, my means to an end. Its existence in the market proved that I had the necessary balls to seize a little bit of the media universe for myself, and now was my chance to explain how I had acquired such balls, and how wonderful it felt to possess them. As far as these columnists were concerned, it seemed, the persona of the “thinking individual” is just a front for something else. Deep down, people are interested only in acquisition, in getting more of everything, and every kind of accomplishment can therefore be boiled down to another article about how another lucky person “made it”. So, while newspapers and radio stations in the UK and US were wanting to have interviews about what a literature of globalisation would look like, or how one can write successfully about ethics in a seemingly post-moral world, Indian columnists wanted me to spill the beans about my staggering personal ambition, the enormous pay-offs I had received, and all the glorious rewards of fame and success. (If my irony is not apparent, I should state clearly that none of this is actually true to my experience.)Since serious artists and intellectuals make their name, generally, as a result of the cogency of their vision of the issues of politics, philosophy and aesthetics that face a given society — one would expect, on the face of it, that the purpose of seeking interviews with such people for a newspaper would be to inject those ideas in an interesting and provocative way into social debate. But, with a very few exceptions, there is no serious social debate in the mainstream Indian press, and this is not its purpose in speaking to such people. The press already has its Idea — the celebration of the grand pantheon of Indian power and money — and it is not looking for new ones. Artists and intellectuals are called upon not to offer critique or alternative visions but to sidle in compliantly amongst the lowest rungs of this same pantheon and so to boost its size and glory. For anything else, Indian newspapers currently do not even possess the language. This can be seen at its most extreme in Indian press coverage of contemporary art, which never even makes an attempt to talk about the questions raised by this most daring and radical of areas of contemporary creativity; all it can do instead is to quote sale prices and gloat nationalistically, if ignorantly, over the slowly rising value of Indian art on the international markets.Any trip to Eastern Europe or Latin America will demonstrate that this whole situation is monotonously widespread in the world, especially in places where the recent euphoria of global markets has made the rightness of wealth banally self-evident, and where the ubiquity of poverty lends it all an additional erotic thrill. But the problem is that India is truly growing into a global superpower — while the delusional excesses of page 3 can make you believe that this is merely a country of the superrich, there is actually something behind the circus’ maniacal energy — and the press will have to abandon these infantile obsessions, so unnerving in a giant, if the rise of this country’s influence is to be accompanied by any significant reflection as to what it means. First of all this implies that newspapers should try to think of people as thinking, not merely acquisitive, individuals. Of course writers and artists and academics, like anyone else, wish to earn money for their work; of course they possess all the same frailties of ego and ambition as everyone else — but their work cannot be reduced simply to this. A true intellectual culture — even just a literate culture — depends on the circulation of these people’s ideas as ideas and not as just more success stories. Virtually the only people whose ideas are expounded seriously and in detail at present are politicians and leading businessmen; and this is a woefully inadequate basis for us to think critically and creatively about the very grave issues that face us. Everyone else is an unthinking, crass, acquisitive machine: every last architect, theatre director, jewellery maker or political activist answers the same ten trite questions in much-edited five-word sentences, appears under the same soul-destroying rubric of “celebrity”, and spouts the same joy at India’s rising and the new possibilities for self-aggrandisement that it offers. (While it is wearying that every individual comes across as the kind of greedy, opportunity-optimising economist’s freak that is the newspapers’ dominant conception of the human being, it is truly terrifying to think of such a creature magnified several hundred million times and turned into an oil-guzzling, market-craving, globe-striding nation-monster, utterly uninterested in fine sentiment or ethical detail.) " ...and so on

Coming back to the question of reclusive authors in India, I think we are beginning to have a few of them. The potential candidates are Ashok Banker and Rana Dasgupta.

Monday, July 11, 2005

Pankaj Mishta has done a brilliant review of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen's book, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity in The Guardian. In his review he has raised many pertinent questions, including this one: "Sen deplores the xenophobia and megalomania of the Hindu nationalists, while approving their "outward-looking economic programme" for globalisation. But are these cultural and economic projects really so far apart? As the Bush-voting American middle class most recently proved, ultranationalism, religious fundamentalism and a belief in free markets are not only fully compatible but can feed off each other."

And ponder this: "One closes this stimulating book wishing that Sen would say more, from his unique vantage point, about the more unprecedented aspects of globalisation today: the all-powerful forms of corporate capitalism, for instance, that threaten much of what he cherishes - democracy, development, human diversity, traditional wisdoms - while trying to turn us all into desperate, if passive, consumers."

Mishra has efficiently highlighted the main threads of Sen's argument, especially in these two pragraphs:

"Sen's more illuminating differences with Naipaul are political. Naipaul sees India as damaged by Muslim invaders and emasculated further by an otherworldly and hierarchical Hinduism - a wounded civilisation that has only recently been revived by contact with western political philosophy and industrialism. Sen points instead to an old tradition of reason and scepticism, which, beginning with the Vedas, was upheld often by India's Muslim rulers, and which he thinks forms the basis of Indian democracy and secularism. According to him, "seeing Indian traditions as overwhelmingly religious, or deeply anti-scientific, or exclusively hierarchical, or fundamentally unsceptical involves significant oversimplifications of India's past and present".

By highlighting Indian achievements in mathematics, astronomy, linguistics, medicine and political economy, Sen also wishes to challenge the commonplace prejudice that the west has "exclusive access to the values that lie at the foundation of rationality and reasoning, science and evidence, liberty and tolerance, and of course rights and justice". He writes about the third-century BC emperor Ashoka, who renounced empire-building and attempted a new form of governance based on Buddhist principles of compassion and tolerance. He also presents the example of the 16th-century Moghul emperor Akbar, who by arguing for a religiously neutral state, set up the "foundations of a non-denominational, secular state which was yet to be born in India or for that matter anywhere else". As Sen is fond of pointing out, Akbar was stressing religious tolerance and upholding reason over blind faith at a time when, in Europe, Giordano Bruno was being arrested for heresy prior to being burned at the stake."

The Murdochian media machinery is also under scrutiny here:

"Sen does not say much about how the argumentative tradition is faring in India in the age of globalisation. The one "quintessential argumentative Indian" he names, the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, is little known in India. And even if he had named others, it would still have to be asked, if only for the sake of argument, whether they can be heard above the din of a media increasingly influenced by the Murdoch model, and preoccupied with stock markets, information technology tycoons, beauty queens, Bollywood starlets, fashion models and other celebrities. "Silence is a powerful enemy of social justice," Sen writes. But so are the celebratory shrieks of minorities empowered by globalisation."

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

I saw two interesting films over the weekend. One was Merchant-Ivory Production's Remains of the Day. The other was Before Sunset.Remains of the Day, based on Kazuo Ishiguro's eponymous novel, is the story of an English butler, Stevens (Anthony Hopkins), who takes a road trip in the West country of England and reminices about his days in the Darlington Hall and his interaction with his former master, Lord Darlington (James Fox), and a former housekeeper, Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson). Much of the narrative is comprised of Stevens's memories of his work as a butler during and just after World War II. Stevens harboured romantic feelings for Miss Kenton but he never expressed them.

"It is a story primarily about regret: throughout his life, Stevens puts his absolute trust and devotion in a man who makes drastic mistakes. In the totality of his professional commitment, Stevens fails to pursue the one woman with whom he could have had a fulfilling and loving relationship. His prim mask of formality cuts him off from intimacy, companionship, and understanding."

I liked this film better than Howard's End. Hopkins has given a deeply moving performance. The movie affects you at a deeper level.

Richard Linklater-directed Before Sunset is a sequel to Before Sunrise. In Before Sunrise, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celina (Julie Delpy) meet in Venice, have a nice time, have a scintillating conversation, and even make love in a park late in the night before going their separate paths, without exchanging any phone numbers or any address. They promise to meet on a certain day in Venice. But that meeting never takes place.

Ten years have passed by. And then comes Before Sunset.Jesse is now married, has a kid, and he has written a novel on his Venice experience. The novel is a best-seller in the US and Jesse comes to Paris on a book tour. The film opens here: Jesse is giving his last book reading in a small book shop. A few hours later, he has a return flight to catch. And as he finishes his talk, there comes Celina. They meet and talk and talk...reminsisning their last meeting, about life, about the world, about their concerns and romance...the whole film is a long converstaion, but what a great conversation it is! I fell in love with this movie.